I tried Evernote a couple of years back, but I really didn't like its UI. I found Growly Notes for OS X; it's a great free-form notebook-type application. I spent considerable time porting over my journal of sixteen years...

After I got my iTouch, I looked for a note-taking app. At the moment I've settled on Noteledge, but I'm not entirely happy with it (e.g. the voice memo feature can't be ported over to the OS X platform). I can save text notes as PDF, send them to Dropbox and take it from there into Growly Notes. Not ideal, but workable.